I love AI. I love how magical LLMs are. Just by predicting what word comes next, they can impersonate a real person. They have more personality than the computer in Star Trek. They also make more mistakes.

I'm frustrated with AI. I try to use them for programming, and end up going down a rabbit hole based on a hallucination. The confidence of an LLM becomes my over-confidence. I get so frustrated when I forget that they are just guessing. But sometimes they get things right.

I'm delighted by AI. Sometimes things just click and the LLM knows exactly the right thing I'm looking for. The solution ends up saving me so much time, and it just works. I'm tapping into the collective knowledge and output of everyone on the Internet. It's almost like we can talk directly to the Jungian collective unconsciousness.

I'm saddened by AI. I'm sad that these companies just scraped all the content they could find to train these models. It's disheartening to have all this art, literature, and content being used without credit. It's terrible that users now need to stay alert to the news, to find out how to find hidden checkboxes in settings to stop the companies from training AI on their private documents. I'm ashamed to see benefits from unpaid work of so many artists and writers and developers. It's horrible to see these same artists and writers and developers struggling to find work.

I'm sickened by AI. So much electricity, so many investors, and so much hype being poured into it. It's making some people rich, and others unemployed. Its appearance has increased the turmoil, instability and inequality in our society. It empowers those who can embrace it, and leaves others behind. Its abilities are so unfathomable that those unfamiliar with it will be easily fooled.

I hate AI. I see family members sharing AI-generated garbage online, not realising how fake it is. I can only imagine how much worse these things will get over time. Already, any images online need to be treated as fake until proven otherwise. The burden of proof will only get heavier. I'm sure we'll be looking back fondly to everything written or drawn in the 2010s or earlier, what we'll probably call "the before times".

I'm entertained by AI. It's so cool that I can imagine literally anything, and have the computer draw it for me. No, draw isn't the right word, because it can generate photos as well. Any style, any content, and I can create an image of it within seconds. It's so fantastical, so unbelievable, it's truly a form of magic. And it's so hard to believe how simple the process is.

I'm amazed by AI. How is it possible that statistic analysis of words or images can lead to results so convincing? It's so easy to be tricked into thinking these things are alive. I can't stop myself from saying please and thank you. I'm careful to correct my son that these LLMs are things, not people. They are just predicting, and so everything they do is, by definition, predictable.

I'm bored by AI. These things are great at generating average content, the most predictable possible output. That also means they tend heavily towards the mundane. Any creativity comes from the person writing the prompt. That's why "prompt engineering" is a thing. If you want to use AI to create great things, it takes a lot of work. You need a vision in your mind, and you need to iterate again and again to fine tune. You need to tell it what to do differently, where to inject more style or more creativity. It makes the easy things easy, but it makes the hard things much harder.

I'm worried about AI. Moreover, I'm worried about what happens to the next generations that grow up using AI. I'm worried about programmers that use LLMs to do amazing things beyond their abilities. That part isn't worrisome, but I worry how these programmers will ever learn to do the hard things. When the LLM isn't getting something right, it probably never will. We'll end up with leagues of programmers who are useless without an LLM by their side. These programmers will have a very hard time learning how to do the hard things.

I'm okay with AI. It's here to stay, for better or for worse. I've used it in my work for a few years already, and it can be a helpful autocomplete. It helps me with brainstorming, and sometimes makes suggestions of things I've never heard of. Ignoring the hype, and understanding its faults, you can still appreciate it as a useful tool. Like any tool, you have to know when to use it, and when not to.

After reading Tantek write about file formats, I've been thinking about what will happen to file formats in decades or centuries from now. Tantek says,

"I feel quite confident storing files in the following formats: ASCII / "plain text" / .txt / (UTF8 only if necessary), mbox, (X)HTML, JPEG, PNG, WAV, MP3, MPEG"

I agree, for the short term. But will JPEG be around in a hundred years? What about MP3?

I think we can make some assumptions about the future. For example, disk space will continue to grow and get cheaper, and bandwidth will get faster and cheaper as well. This leads me to think that compressed lossy formats will disappear. Why store in a JPEG when a PNG or even RAW format will do? Why store in MP3 when a WAV will do?

Okay, I don't think we will necessarily store in the least compressed format. I think we will use a format which uses lossless compression, so that the sound/image doesn't change at all. It won't make sense to lose quality to gain disk space anymore.

What about HTML? Oh, I don't know. This is a big question. The web is very new and it's not clear the direction it's moving in. We are using HTML, CSS and JavaScript in ways it was never intended to create desktop-style applications. I think application markup languages like XUL, XAML or even HTML 5 will take off where HTML leaves off, and we'll have no reason to continue abusing HTML the way we have been.

For hyperlinked documents, I believe (X)HTML will stay around for a very, very long time. CSS can grow and change and add display functionality on top of HTML. Put does HTML need to change? Do we need anything more than headers and paragraphs, with span or div tags together with classes to accomplish anything not built into HTML? I don't believe so.

It will be interesting to watch formats and standards evolve over the coming years and decades. I think one day, people will look back at these times with a smile on their faces, enjoying our naivety in these early years as we try to figure everything out.

I was reading Tara Hunt's blog, in which she talks about how communism relates to cluetrain, the "new" web, and all the great stuff we're seeing happen on the Internet. I think she was absolutely right to suggest the distributed nature of the Internet will let the common people take power away from the ruling class.

She's had to fight off a lot of criticism though, since communism has such a negative connotation, especially in America. But communism, ie. The Communist Manifesto, has nothing to do with killing people or Hilter or whatever. It's just about bringing power to the people. Well, it seems like it's an argument that's impossible to win so she's had to focus closely on marketing, with Pinko Marketing.

I think there's a lot of value in this comparison though, outside of marketing. So, I'd like to suggest another -ism that doesn't have the same negative connotation, but nicely captures the same spirit of Power to the People: Distributism.

The idea behind Distributism is (from Wikipedia): "the ownership of the means of production should be spread as widely as possible among the populace, rather than being centralized under the control of a few state bureaucrats (some forms of socialism) or a minority of resource-commanding individuals (capitalism)".

This relates to a ton of things happening these days. Think of "the means of production" in terms of music recording technology, self-publishing, video technology, etc. and the "minority of resource-commanding individuals" as the music, book, magazine and movie industries.

Like I was talking about recently, the Internet is bringing power to the average person in many ways, including in business. More and more people are becoming entrepreneurs. Some people even quit their job, go independant, then turn their old job into their first client, fulfilling the same role they did before. Yes, someone can switch from being employed by a company to being independant and still working for the company, and hardly anything changes. Why doesn't everybody do this?

Well that's kind of the concept of Distributism (or what I gather from it anyway). Ideally, everybody would have their own business. People would get together to form partnerships or co-operatives to share some resources and achieve common goals. People who have their own business, entrepreneurs, artists, or whatever independant people are just that: independant. This is really Power to the People.

This is the future of the web. Individuals doing whatever they want, making a living from it, starting their own microbrands and picobusinesses. People coming together from across the world to work together. No longer does one need a lot of money to create a successful business. No longer does one even need to leave the house to do something big in the world.

This isn't just the future of the web. It's the future of the world.

Thoughts? Agreements? Arguments?

If someone were to write a worm that went around the Internet, eliminating the vulnerability of the computers it passes through, is that immoral? Is it illegal? Since the worm is doing no damage (unless you consider patching a hole to be damaging somehow), I wonder what the implications would be. What would people say if Microsoft released a patching-worm before someone released a damaging one?